It Is Possible to Say

too much. The thunder outside my window just said plenty. As a matter of fact it startled me. This is why almost every major eastern religion is very big on silence. The other day I made a note to myself that silence is always pregnant. What I mean to say by this is that silence is always, always, always in the state of “about to give birth to sound.” Sound is created out of silence.
This is striking, though, for a number of reasons. Silence is never possible, or, at least, it isn’t sustainable. The only place, technically, that silence can ever occur is inside a vacuum, and human beings cannot survive there. And yet, it is the goal precisely because it is unattainable. Would the sound of gently falling rain (and all that white noise in general) be so soothing if it weren’t for the fact that most of the time there weren’t those sounds? Doubtful, mon cher, very doubtful.
It works the same way in communication and words and language. This is where the beauty of poetry derives its nature from, and why wordiness can be boring. Poetry is the art of saying as much as possible in as little space as possible. That definition might garner some arguers, but I’d stand by it. Even if you take the great epic poems like The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Divine Comedy, Beowulf, Paradise Lost, and just about any other, the space that these things are covering is truly beyond comprehension.
The terseness of William Carlos Williams, is perhaps a good juxtaposition:

so much depends
upon
a red wheel

barrow
glazed with rain

water
beside the white
chickens.

The thing is this: when in the midst of silence, I and I alone pull out the meaning. What does Williams mean by that “so much depends upon” business anyway? It doesn’t really matter what he meant by it. His silence on the meaning is the license to subjectify. Or what is the real significance of Homer’s Catologue of Ships in The Iliad. Art is a thing thinging. Silence is nothingness nothing.
(Sometimes I get playful with the language, and I’m well aware of my excesses in this department.)
I want to know what it is possible to NOT say, and the more I experiment, the more I come to find that you can NOT say almost more than you can say. This is art. What is a painting but a two-dimensional representation of something else? Ah, but it means. What does it mean? Barely matters. It’s not saying anything technically. And yet it is by its simple presence. Just like me. Just like you. We are all things thinging.
I’m working on brevity these days. Stopping the word flow just when it’s necessary. Otherwise I wind up waking up to way too much watered-down matter. It is the rainy season in Korea, and I suppose you CAN have too much of a good thing, but, so far, the falling rain saying things to me hasn’t yet grown old.